The Oxford English Literary History
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Description
The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more.Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers.
In the future will there be a literary history of England, or will it be an English-language literary history? This important volume in the new Oxford English Literary History covers colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant writers since 1948. After the wave of decolonization following World War II and the growth of large immigrant communities in England, Bruce King asks the questions: Can we still talk of the English nation as a cultural unit? What does it mean to be British, English, or national? In his broad-ranging discussion, he covers such topics as Black British Poetry and Drama, Commonwealth Literature, and British African Literature, and looks in depth at writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith.
King writes from the conviction that it is wrong to assume that national cultures are finished. As he lucidly and persuasively demonstrates, a large, accomplished, socially significant body of writing in England sits between and overlaps with an older British tradition and its various sub-divisions, new national literatures, a post-imperial Commonwealth tradition, and contemporary global literature.
Features
- The concluding volume in The Oxford English Literary History
- Covers colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant writers since 1948, including writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Doris Lessing
- Discusses the future of English literary history-- can it continue to exist in this age of globalization?
Reviews
"This survey is unprecedented in its seriousness and detail. King traces historical influences, along with the biography of subsequent writers, putting them in the context of both their ethnic background and their British environment. He reads genres with an unusual degree of attention.... King brings to the scene the virtues of traditional lit-crit along with a tough-minded determination to map the features of the new writing. He begins with a refreshingly bullish justification of his title."--Mike Phillips, The Guardian Review
"King provides an authoritative, brisk, and detailed survey of the poetry, fiction, and drama produced by these writers since 1948.... he deftly places the texts within their specific historical, social, and biographical contexts...The Internationalization of English Literature provides an essential resource for anyone who wishes to explore the literature produce in England during the past fifty years, and a means for scholars who wish to pursue the fuller implications of its title."--Research in African Literatures
"Bruce King is one of the pioneering scholars of world literature in English.... Although several good anthologies and readers already exist in the field, this is the first comprehensive literary history of Black and Asian literature after World War II. As such, King's book--judicious, thorough, steeped in its sources--is a major critical contribution to both 'postcolonial' and 'English' literary history.... This is a groundbreaking yet engagingly readable overview of one of the most important and exciting new areas in literary studies."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"The new Oxford English Literary History series [is] destined to become a standard academic source.... Advanced undergraduates will join lifelong learners in praising these volumes as sources of renewed and renewable literary energy."--The Providence Journal
About the Author(s)
Bruce King is a former lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. His publications include New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, Modern Indian Poetry in English, Three Indian Poets, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.
